Tag: climate

Downshifting Before the Cliff

Post author By Redactor
Post date September 25, 2023
1 Comment on Downshifting Before the Cliff

climate, global warming, energy, government

A scenario: You and millions of others are willy-nilly running toward a cliff.

You don’t want to go over the cliff; like Bartleby, you would prefer not to. But you’re caught in the surging mass. Enough of the stampeders think that it’s the greatest idea ever — long overdue, in fact.

But just as you’re coming within sight of the cliff, the Great Leader leading the charge raises his hand and asks to be heard.

“We have decided that we are running too fast toward the cliff. We need more time to make the transition. We will therefore reduce the speed of our blind hurtling toward the cliff by 11 percent.”

Fiction? No.

The above summarizes the amended policy of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vis-à-vis how quickly policymakers will shove Britain’s industrial society over the proverbial cliff in the name of pretending to fine-tune global climate. Various bans on various things that people need in order to function will reportedly be slightly delayed so that people have more time to . . . pretend . . . to prepare.

It won’t become illegal to sell petrol (gas) and diesel vehicles so that buyers of new cars would be stuck with more expensive and impractical battery-powered cars until 2035.

Not 2030 as previously stated.

Instead of 100 percent of gas boilers being phased out by 2035, the new goal is 80 percent.

Off-grid oil burners will now be banned in 2035, not 2026.

Other slight delays of annihilative mandates are also in the works.

British people, enjoy your five-year and nine-year reprieves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly general freedom international affairs

Austerity Theater

Does Spain really need a Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge?

Well, the country’s reproduction rate has fallen dramatically, with the demographics heading into a tailspin. This is what decadence really means. So maybe, just maybe, the government should look into it.

But does Spain really need Teresa Ribera?

She’s the minister in charge of MITECO, the department in question. She hit international notoriety last week when video of her riding a bicycle to an EU “climate summit” proved to be something other than a valiant commitment to climate-crisis austerity.

While she intended her cycling to hit the news cycle, how it hit proved . . . hilarious.

She had arrived at the summit via jet — and not a commercial airliner — and then was transported by limo to a spot a hundred meters from the event, stopping to get on her bicycle and pedaling the last bit.

For the show.

Why she thought she’d get away with what Pete Buttigieg had failed at in 2021, as The Daily Wire noted, I don’t know. Maybe our leaders think we’re that stupid. Or perhaps they haven’t completely transitioned to the Age of the iPhone and Internet Challenge.

We must wonder: Do our leaders really believe their own climate prophecies?

They don’t seem to, any more than they believed, in the thick of the pandemic, that masking up and social distancing was something that they, too, should do.

That could be one take-away. But another is that they do, but they know that climate austerity, like the lockdowns, make sense only if most people comply. They are not “most people.” They are special.

For them, the elites, austerity is just a show.

To set us up to suffer — for real.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags climate, Climate Change Austerity, elites

national politics & policies

End in Ice?

When I was young, some folks worried about a return to Ice Age conditions. The climate alarm, in the decades since, prophesies hotter conditions, not colder.

So, with this cold snap hitting North America — ice storms from Washington State to Texas and now heading east by northeast — climate change has emerged in the back (or even front) of our minds.

It’s just not necessarily Fire we fret about. It’s Ice. (Cue recitation of the great Robert Frost poem, now.)

“The arctic air that poured into Texas resulted in a record-breaking demand for power that caused the state’s electric grid to fail,” the Weather Channel reports. “Suppliers had planned to use rolling blackouts, but the system was overwhelmed” — effecting an “estimated 75% of Texas power generation capacity.”

Millions in Mexico are also without power, because natural gas pipelines from Texas froze.

The main hit to the electric grid sure looks like it has been directly* to the distribution — if what I glean from Georgetown’s electric outage page is a good indication.

But that town went heavy into alternative forms of energy production (as has the whole of the state, along with many others). Did that investment help them when the cold came? Former Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette says the problem is that alternative energy sources are not “base load electricity” but “intermittant and sometimes unreliable.”

Just as batteries under-perform in the cold, windmills don’t turn well when covered in ice. When we really need power, energy production that flakes out is not an energy alternative at all — it’s non-energy.

And if an Ice Age does come back, we’ll need more energy, not less than were global warming to remain the trend.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The reason there was no weekend podcast from me is that my partner in podcasting was without power simply because an ice storm brought down trees on multiple power lines in his area.

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ideological culture

Mad Prophetess?

The latest scandal of the How Dare You Say That!?! variety features The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who is banned from Fox News, we learn, because he characterized the celebrated “climate activist” Greta Thunberg as “mentally ill.”

He said it while serving as one of those invited talking heads. The other guest immediately cried “how dare you?”

And censoriousness ensued, with high moral dudgeon and nasty put-downs and the whole shebang.

While I don’t really know much about Miss Thunberg’s mental health going into all this, I do not believe it can be much improved by playing Prophetess on the world stage.

Which also gives too much cultural power to someone so young. And since power corrupts . . . that’s not good for Greta, and it makes her promoters corruptors.

And that is the point Mr. Knowles appeared to be trying to make. Reasonable people can disagree on the propriety of how “the execrable Michael Knowles” (as his fellow Daily Wire colleagues jovially refer to him) referred to the Swedish prophetess, of course. But it nevertheless remains rather shocking to witness

activist adults abuse
one child to
scare millions of children to
pressure powerful adults to
engage in precipitous policy action.

“Adults sometimes like to use children to carry their messages,” vidcaster and Dilbert creator Scott Adams points out, “because it makes it hard for the other side to criticize them without seeming like monsters.”

How can we “listen to the scientists,” as Miss Thunberg recently implored, if the talking is being done by a young teenage non-scientist?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies Popular

Greener Pastures

CO2, Carbon DiOxide, green, greenhouse, warming, climate,

There is climate change going on. And some of it is attributable to increasing levels of Carbon dioxide (CO₂).

It is uncontroversial and quite politically convenient to say that — despite Al Gore’s infamous propaganda positing climate change dogma as An Inconvenient Truth. The worldwide “green” movement to “fight climate change” has been supported by trillions of tax dollars and the eager, lip-smacking glee of major media mavens as they trot out story after improbable story, linking every storm, warm spell, cold spell, and summer ice melt to “man-made global warming.”

But there is no real “settled science” as non-scientists like to term the case for anthropogenic global warming, because there are

troubles with the temperature data,
difficulties separating weather events from climatic trends,
problems identifying CO₂ level variations as the cause of climate change rather than as a result,
a certain amount of dunderheadedness using a statistical construct of “average global temperature” to track actual trends, and

so much more. But we do know about one extremely positive effect of increasing atmospheric carbon: it makes the deserts bloom.

Or, at least, greener.

Six years ago a study of satellite data concluded that arid regions have gone greener. Increased atmospheric CO₂ levels makes photosynthesis more efficient, allowing plants to use less water, thereby creating more leaves.

Earlier this year, however, Forbes reported that a NASA study had just demonstrated that expanded agriculture and silviculture in India and China were responsible for most of that greening — but if you compare the Forbes article with the original paper, the CO₂ contribution persists.

Atmospheric carbon is plant food, so to speak, and without it, life on the planet would die.

An awkward truth?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags carbon dioxide, climate, climate change, CO2, global warming, green, greenhouse, warming

general freedom media and media people nannyism too much government

When Push Comes to Nudge

Ireland, global warming, authoritarian, totalitarian, control, climate,

Ireland’s prime minister — or “Taoiseach” — is enthusiastic. “Speaking at the launch of the Climate Action Plan in Grangegorman today,” the Independent reported last week, “Mr [Leo Eric] Varadkar said the government would establish a Climate Action Delivery Board in the Department of the Taoiseach to oversee its implementation.”

The plan will deeply affect “almost every aspect” of Irish life. “The Government plans to force petrol and diesel cars off our roads,” the Independent elaborates, “introduce new buildings regulations and change the school curriculum in a bid to counteract climate change.”

Though the scope of the effort is breathtaking, Mr. Varadkar pretends he is being oh-so-humble and cautious, “nudging” citizens rather than going for a “coercive” approach.

Typical politician’s whopper, of course. Higher taxes on fuel and plastics, banning oil and gas boilers in new buildings, forcing private cars off city roads — this is all force.

Pretending otherwise is something akin to a Big Lie.

And all in service to the cause of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions by two per cent a year each year for the next ten years.”

Varadkar says he is doing it for the young and at the behest of the young . . . who have been propagandized to believe “that the world will be destroyed in a climate apocalypse.”

Well, the Taoiseach didn’t use the word “propagandized,” and insists that disaster is “not inevitable, it can be stopped, action can be taken.”

But Ireland’s contribution to the planet’s “greenhouse gases” is negligible. If all the Irish held their breaths and keeled over for the cause, they wouldn’t make a carbon dioxide burp of a difference.

It is a power grab. Not anything like a “nudge.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.